I love music; I love lyrics. (I love my baby and my baby loves me). Ahem…
Several years ago, my sister-in-law gave me a copy of Reading Lyrics, edited by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball. It’s filled with “more than 1,000 of the finest lyrics from 1900 to 1975,” and is one of my favorite books. When my son was younger, he’d like it when I’d open the book, pick out lyrics to a song I knew and sing it for him.
I grew up with a mom who had (and still has) a lovely singing voice and a love for “The Great American Songbook” – the songs of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Hoagy Carmichael, Frank Loesser, Duke Ellington, Jule Styne, Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Jimmy Van Heusen…stop me, please!
As a lover of music and musical theater growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, there was nothing better than season tickets to the Shubert Theater.
Two years after opening the Shubert in New York City, the Shubert Brothers built New Haven’s Shubert. Opening night, Friday, Dec. 11, 1914, featured The Belle of Bond Street, in which popular comedian Sam Bernard sang, “Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle while Rip Van Winkle Was Away?” Better fare was yet to come!
“Our” Shubert was called “The Birthplace of the Nation’s Greatest Hits,” because it hosted more than 600 Broadway try-outs, 300 world premieres and 50 American premieres since it opened, double that of any New York theater or try-out house.
According to a New York Times article on the 75th anniversary celebration of the theater, “Nijinsky danced there. Bernhardt acted there. Rachmaninoff played there, and the Marx Brothers carried on there.”
When I was growing up, however, the economics of Broadway productions and out-of-town try-outs had changed. So with our season tickets, my mom and I enjoyed good road company productions of The Sound of Music, Camelot, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Oliver!, My Fair Lady, Damn Yankees, The King and I, Stop the World, I Want to Get Off and many others.
My mom bought the cast albums from all the shows. We’d play them over and over, and sing along until we had the lyrics down pat. After all, when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way…and you’ve got to know what you’re singing to Officer Krupke.
I was thinking today about how all those songs began – usually without fanfare, without preface, without introduction. They launch right into the story they’re going to tell us, just the way a good speech should.
So in Gypsy, Stephen Sondheim writes this opening for “Some People,” sung by the Gypsy Rose Lee character, describing a life she cannot live: “Some people can get a thrill/knitting sweaters and sitting still/That’s okay for some people who don’t know they’re alive. Some people can thrive and bloom/living life in a living room/that’s perfect for some people of one hundred and five. But I/at least gotta try…”
And Johnny Mercer opens “One for My Baby,” his lament for lost love, like this: “It’s quarter to three/There’s no one in the place except you and me/So, set ‘em up, Joe/I’ve got a little story you oughta know. We’re drinking, my friend/to the end of a brief episode. Make it one for my baby/and one more for the road.”
Finally, Rodgers and Hammerstein raise the issue of racial prejudice in the opening lines of “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” (South Pacific). “You’ve got to be taught/to hate and fear/You’ve got to be taught/from year to year/It’s got to be drummed/in your dear little ear/You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
More contemporary songs do the same thing – using few words to set up or begin telling their stories.
Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” begins, “Tommy used to work on the docks/union’s been on strike/He’s down on his luck/so tough, so tough…”
Billy Joel’s “Allentown” starts, “Well we’re livin’ here in Allentown/And they’re closin’ all the factories down/Out in Bethlehem they’re killin’ time/fillin’ out forms/standin’ in line..”
“Like a comet/blazing ‘cross the evening sky/Gone too soon. Like a rainbow/fading in the twinkling of an eye/Gone too soon. Shiny and sparkly/and splendidly bright/here one day/gone one night…” is the way Michael Jackson begins “Gone too Soon,” his tribute to AIDS’ victim Ryan White, who died at age 18.
What can these poignant and powerful songs teach us about writing speeches? Just like a song, a speech is a story. Like a song, a speech has only a brief time in which to capture an audience’s attention and pull listeners in.
Don’t waste that precious time thanking the college president, his board of trustees, the mayor, the faculty, distinguished guests, the parents, the students…and oh, Mr. Don Dollars who endowed the new gymnasium.
Jump in there! Take flight! Be bold! Tell your story!
You’re a Jet. Act like one.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I loved this post. I have a paperback, Lyrics for 500 Songs America Loves to Sing, that I bought just to read the Lyrics. It brought me to the conclusion that all the songs I’ve ever liked are poems that tell stories. All the songs I never liked don’t make it as poetry. They’re unimaginative, repetitive, and scan as doggerel junk. The song genre doesn’t matter. Music enhances good poems/songs. It doesn’t do much for doggerel unless you just want noise to stomp to.
I also have always loved musicals and show tunes. My high school’s drama department arranged trips to all the new touring musicals at Chicago’s Schubert Theater (about a 2-hr ride away), and invited anyone on the honor roll to come along and fill up the bus to reduce the cost. There is a Musical Heritage Society-sponsored program, “On the Town”, featuring songs from great musicals on our local public radio station on Friday Nights. Look for it in your local station’s schedule.
Now I have to remember to write a speech that “sings”.
Oh, Cindy, you struck at my heart with this one! Not only do I love musicals and brilliant lyrics, but I was a professional musical theatre performer and cabaret singer in my former life. (A very valuable experience to have in speechwriting, BTW.)
I would add to your observation that while these songs appear to spring out of nowhere in the shows, in fact the best are germane to the story within which they’re placed. They spring forth at moments in the story where someone simply must sing because there is such a visceral response or dramatic event taking place - that moment requires heightening and illuminating with song. You can’t take the song out of its context and understand it completely; yet it has a universal resonance all the same.
Likewise our speeches - they have to be ABOUT something, arising from an urgency and specificity to both the speaker and the situation. I know that when I stumble upon that singularity, the words often spill out faster than I can type. That’s when I know I’ve “touched the gold.” (Check out http://tinyurl.com/yz8es2m for the lyrics and melody to this stunning song by Linda Eder.)
Cindy,
I’d sing the praises of this post, but, trust me, you do not want me to break out in song. (Have you ever heard a rabbit dying?) But I agree wholeheartedly with your point. Memorable songs are a great analogy.
Lurking speakers…did you hear what Cindy said? She speaks truth.
“Don’t waste that precious time thanking the college president, his board of trustees, the mayor, the faculty, distinguished guests, the parents, the students…and oh, Mr. Don Dollars who endowed the new gymnasium.”
If only logic and reason and evidence were enough to help convince a speaker to abandon the energy-sapping tradition of opening formalities and niceties.
I’ve had some success in getting a few principals to agree to relocate the niceties to a more effective spot in the speech. Interwoven into the substance of the speech, acknowledgments become meaningful instead of perfunctory–not to mention halfway interesting to those not being singled out for mention.
Kathryn, a Jet all the way
As speechwriters,